Technical Field
The present invention relates to an electronic device, especially related to a human hearing test method and system.
Related Arts
Human hearing test can be used to provide the objective assessment of the human hearing sensibility. Pure tone audiometry (PTA) is one of the very important hearing tests to date, which provides quantitative assessment to the sound level of the human hearing threshold; categorical loudness scaling offers more perceptual assessment across the entire human hearing range on top of the hearing threshold measurement.
PTA includes a sound familiarization phase and a hearing threshold test phase in general. The sound familiarization phase is to provide demonstrations of the test sound to a testing human subject. The hearing threshold test phase is to test the hearing threshold level of the subject. Test methods and procedures of PTA can be found in American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, (2005). Guidelines for Manual Pure-Tone Threshold Audiometry [Guidelines].
Categorical loudness scaling is to test the hearing range between the maximum and minimum sound levels perceptually, and then to divide the aforementioned hearing range by several pre-designed sub-ranges. Test methods and procedures of the categorical loudness scaling can be found in ISO 16832 “Acoustics-Loudness scaling by means of categories”, Brand, T., Hohmann, V., An adaptive procedure for categorical loudness scaling. J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 112(4), pp. 1597-1604 (200) and “Loudness”, edited by Florentine M., Popper A. N., and Fay R. R. New York: Springer (2011).
The PTA and categorical loudness scaling methods described above, however, may have inaccurate hearing test results near the hearing threshold (Gelfand S A., 2009. “Hearing: an Introduction to Psychological and Physiological Acoustics”, CRC Press; 5 edition, Dec. 18, 2009). Malingering, intending to respond to a predetermined reference level of loudness that is above the real threshold, may cause the false results. Subjects may also perceptually feel the maximum sound level differently at different test frequencies (given the maximum sound levels cannot be provided across all test frequencies). The categorical loudness scaling method may fail to detect such discrepancies from the subjects, and then lead to incorrect hearing assessment in the end; subjects may get tired and boring shortly after PTA test starts.